“Clickers” allow students to respond to questions during class using a wireless, handheld device. Instructors can then immediately view and display the results, often in the form of a poll. The Chronicle interviewed Derek Bruff, an assistant director at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, who just published Teaching With Classroom Response Systems (Jossey-Bass, 2009) after interviewing 50 instructors who use clickers. Some strategies work, he says, while others do not.

Q. Can you describe some of the most popular ways that clickers are being used?

A. A pretty popular approach to using clickers is called peer instruction. Ask a question, have all the students think about it and respond to it individually, and then take a look at the results. If there’s a lot of consensus around the question, then it may be time to move on to the next thing. If there’s disagreement, then this is...

Research scientists with egalitarian tendencies toward publication may want to think twice if they also hope to make tenure. A study by a pair of investigators at the University of Chicago has concluded that researchers may find a wider audience if they make their findings available through a fee-based Web site rather than make their work freely available on the Internet.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Science, say that when a research article is offered online after being in print for one year, the use of an open-source format increases citations to the article by 8 percent. But when a paid-subscription format is used to distribute a year-old print article, the citations increase by 12 percent.

The exception, said the study’s authors, James A. Evans and Jacob Reimer, is the developing world, where researchers were far more likely to read and cite...

The Ed Techie, an education blogger, tried to have a debate with colleagues using Twitter, the micro-messaging service. The Ed Techie, also known as Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University in Britain, tried to get people talking about “virality” as an educational tool. The idea of virality, as he defined it, was an idea that causes people to react because it neatly encapsulates a concept.

It didn’t work, he says. “Although the inputs I had were good (and thank you to those who contributed), it didn’t really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn’t go viral,” he says in a new blog post.

Reasons? The Ed Techie suggests four of them:

1. The idea of virality in education is kind of boring.

2. The timing was bad. He launched the debate on Friday, “which may not be the best day of the week” because people have mentally checked out for ...

That is, of course, a wild exaggeration. The Henry Madden Library at California State University-Fresno does need a bunch of tables and chairs—nearly $8-million worth—but the new facility is set to open on February 19 anyway. After all, it does have online services and books and staff to help faculty and students find things.

The California state budget crisis has put a lot of furniture on hold at the $105-million building. But Peter McDonald, the library dean, points out that the essentials are in place, in a revealing interview with the Library Journal Academic Newswire.

“The collection level below the first floor is arguably the largest single-floor open compact shelving in the world,” Mr. McDonald said. It “can hold on a single floor upwards of 1.3 million items. So the books as such remain in the building, it is just that they are significantly compacted to make room elsewhere...

Colleges do a poor job preparing students for careers designing Web sites or for related positions in Web development, often because they teach out-of-date curricula and fail to hire instructors with recent experience in the field, according to a survey of top Web designers and developers.

The survey, “Teach the Web,” was culled from interviews with 32 prominent Web designers and developers. Many of them said that colleges often forgo teaching the fundamentals of making Web sites in favor of teaching narrow skills like Flash and Photoshop, leaving students unprepared for getting a job.

“I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them,” said James Archer, chief executive of Forty Agency, a branding firm. “Most of the time, they’ve been brought a long way down the wrong path.”...

In recent years, the attention of many information-technology professionals has turned to making their systems more sustainable and energy-efficient. But most organizations have still failed to address a huge amount of low-hanging fruit, speakers at a conference, Greening the Internet Economy, said last week.

The conference, which was held at the University of California at San Diego, attracted some of the leading voices in green technology from vendors, universities, and government. When buying and managing servers and other infrastructure, universities and others are just starting to factor environmental considerations into their core decisions, said Horst D. Simon, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“Everybody does green. We’re halfway there because people have recognized we have a problem,” Mr. Simon said. “But if ...

At the Bytes and Books Inaugural Ball yesterday, I missed George Lucas. The crowds streaming from Barack Obama’s parade slowed travel time a lot. But really, the Star Wars creator was not the star of this show, or belle of this ball, which was thrown by the National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training.

The headliner was the feeling that people pushing technology in education were no longer “voices in the wilderness,” as Trina J. Davis, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University at College Station, said. “I don’t think we are lone wolves anymore,” said Ms. Davis, looking at the throng filling the ball site, the Folger Shakespeare Library. Elegant bound volumes filled shelves that climbed towards curved ceilings; red, white, and blue lights colored the black-tie party-goers. Tickets cost various sponsoring organizations about $1,200 each. Those groups could hand them ...

A student journalist at Western Oregon University was reprimanded, and the newspaper adviser was fired, after publishing an article showing the institution had not secured sensitive, private information about some applicants. Those actions, in 2007, last week produced a letter of censure from College Media Advisers, the group representing people who advise student-run media.

The censure involves a lot of letter writing. The university president got an official letter from the CMA president. That organization also notifies its members, asking them to write “letters of concern” to administrators, board members, and other “individuals of influence at the censured institution,” according to the group’s bylaws.

The censure was provoked, the CMA said in a written statement, by the university’s heavy-handed response to the newspaper article. As reported in The Chronicle in 2007, a...

Anyone can create a Facebook group and make it appear to be something it’s not.

Brad J. Ward reminded admissions officials about that simple fact on Thursday after examining hundreds of “Class of 2013” groups that have popped up on the popular social-networking site. Typically, students who plan to enroll at a particular college create such groups to start communicating with their future classmates. Some colleges establish the groups or encourage admitted students to do so.

But Mr. Ward, coordinator for electronic communication in Butler University’s admissions office, found that dozens of the 2013 Facebook groups had been created — or were being maintained — by the same handful of people. Who were they?

On his blog, SquaredPeg.com, Mr. Ward wrote early this morning that, with the help of other admissions officials, he had traced several of the names to College Prowler, a...

At the New School, faculty members have been exceedingly unhappy with President Bob Kerrey. Earlier this week, full-time faculty members hit him with a “no confidence” vote that passed by a margin of 269 to 8 (with 10 abstentions), as Audrey Williams June reported for The Chronicle. They don’t like his management style and feel he doesn’t listen to them. So Mr. Kerrey, to open up communication, has started a blog, Blogging with President Bob Kerrey.

“Welcome to my blog. I look forward to having a direct conversation with you about the future of the New School. Thanks. Bob,” Mr. Kerrey wrote in his first post.

His second post, in which he thanked faculty members for their frankness and said he would not serve as interim chief academic officer while the institution looked for a new provost—he originally said he would, which rankled professors worried about a consolidation of power by ...